The World Peace Diet: Eating For Spiritual Health And Social Harmony

228 / the world peace diet
We are not predatory by nature, but we’ve been taught that we are,
in the most potent way possible: we’ve been raised from birth to eat like
predators. We’ve thus been initiated into a predatory culture and been
forced to see ourselves at the deepest levels as predators. Farming animals
is simply a refined and perverse form of predation in which the animals
are confined before being attacked and killed. It doesn’t stop with
animals, however. As we all know in our bones, there is a predatory
quality to our economic system, and competition underlies all our institutions.
We prey upon each other. It may not be obvious from within
our planet’s dominant society, but our culture and our corporations and
other institutions act in ways that can only be described as predatory
vis-à-vis those who are less industrialized, less wealthy, and less able to
protect themselves. As we prey upon and “harvest” animals, we use and
prey upon people, employing euphemisms according to the situation as
“foreign aid,” “privatization,” “advertising,” “spreading the gospel,”
“capitalism,” “education,” “free trade,” “lending,” “fighting terrorism,”
“development,” and countless other agreeable expressions. The
tender loving heart of our true nonpredatory nature is troubled by all
this, but it shines unceasingly, and though it’s perhaps covered over by
our conditioning, it nevertheless inspires the selfless giving, compassion,
and enlightenment that our spiritual traditions expound.
Some Traditions of Intuition and Compassion
Although our religious institutions have generally mirrored the prevailing
cultural paradigm that sees animals as commodities and have thus
offered them little real relief in their suffering, there are nevertheless
many spiritual teachings and traditions existing within the world’s religions
that exhort us to abandon the predatory mentality and to cultivate
compassion for animals. These spiritual traditions also fundamentally
agree in their emphasis on intuition, or direct inner knowing, as an
essential element of spiritual discipline and practice. This is true not
only with regard to Eastern traditions such as the various forms of
Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, and Taoist practice, but also in the more esoteric
Western traditions, such as those of the Sufis, cabalists, Christian mystics,
and others. These traditions typically encourage their adherents to